From Ministries to Elective Offices: Partisan and Presidential Strategies to Candidates' Recruitment

Abstract

This paper analyses ministerial experience as partisan and presidential strategies to foster political career of technocrats ministers under coalition government in Brazil widening the supply of candidates to electoral competition. Former technocrats ministers have become party members and have increased the candidates' supply for elective offices. This trend has challenged the current view of ministerial nomination of technocrats as a presidential strategy to overcome the politicization effects on executive performance. We explain this move as an alternative recruitment of new candidates for electoral competition. We explore the hypothesis that the likelihood of a technocrat minister to be a candidate Increases when they are informally linked with the party responsible for her nomination; they took part in policy communities related to ministerial jurisdiction; ministry is organized alongside to federative structures; if ministerial policies have distributive effects; the minister's visibility and his activism into parliamentary and executive settings; the salience of policy areas. This study explores news implications of coalition politics, focusing on the opportunities for candidate recruitment by ministerial selection.